With his long, white hand Mora continued to stroke his mustache with a favourite gesture, to talk with Monpavon of the club, of the foyer of the Varietes, asking news of the Chamber, how matters stood with regard to the Nabob’s election—­all this coldly, without the least affectation.  Then, tired, no doubt, or fearing lest his glance, constantly drawn to that curtain opposite him, from behind which the sentence was to come presently, should betray the emotion which he must have felt in the depths of his soul, he laid his head on the pillow, closed his eyes, and did not open them again until the return of the doctors.  Still the same cold and sinister faces, veritable physiognomies of judges having on their lips the terrible decree of human fate, the final word which the courts pronounce fearlessly, but which the doctors, whose science it mocks, elude, and express in periphrases.

“Well, gentlemen, what says the faculty?” demanded the sick man.

There were sundry murmurs of hypocritical encouragement, vague recommendations; then the three learned physicians hastened to depart, eager to escape from the responsibility of this disaster.  Monpavon rushed after them.  Jenkins remained at the bedside, overwhelmed by the cruel truths which he had just heard during the consultation.  In vain had he laid his hand on his heart, quoted his famous motto; Bouchereau had not spared him.  It was not the first of the Irishman’s clients whom he had seen thus suddenly collapse; but he fervently hoped that the death of Mora would act as a salutary warning to the world of fashion, and that the prefect of police, after this great calamity, would send the “dealer in cantharides” to retail his drugs on the other side of the Channel.

The duke understood immediately that neither Jenkins nor Louis would tell him the true issue of the consultation.  He abstained, therefore, from any insistence in his questionings of them, submitted to their pretended confidence, affected even to share it, to believe the most hopeful things they announced to him.  But when Monpavon returned, he summoned him to his bedside, and, confronted by the lie visible even beneath the make-up of the decrepit old man, remarked: 

“Oh, you know—­no humbug!  From you to me, truth.  What do they say?  I am in a very bad way, eh?”

Monpavon prefaced his reply with a significant silence; then brutally, cynically, for fear of breaking down as he spoke: 

“Done for, my poor Augustus!”

The duke received the sentence full in the face without flinching.

“Ah!” he said simply.

He pulled his mustache with a mechanical gesture, but his features remained motionless.  And immediately he made up his mind.